Plastic crap, and an update

I didn't take many photos last weekend, so this is from a week or two ago. Most of the snow is gone now, and I'm actually wearing street shoes instead of my winter mocs.

We're supposed to get more snow tonight.

Yep.

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I seem to be surrounded by plastic at the moment.

There's a reason for it, of course. I just received the order I'd placed to a scientific supply company for some replacement equipment for our school programs. Sampling equipment, I guess you could say. Bug boxes, magnifiers, petri dishes...

A whole lot of plastic crap.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and debate our need for plastic because the fact is that our world as it is at the moment couldn't begin to operate without plastics. No, what I want to know is why does my staff go through so much plastic crap?

I work at a nature centre. I wouldn't call myself a tree hugger by a long shot, but part of our responsibility is to try to teach people environmental stewardship and responsibility. And yet we're continually losing magnifiers and breaking bug boxes.

It's kind of boggling.





Ok, ok, I'll come clean here. The petri dishes I don't mind so much because they're disposable and we still manage to get through a year of pond studies on one sleeve of them (usually). The bug boxes I understand because it's hard to keep groups of excited Grade Twos from bashing them together so hard in their hunt for invertebrates that the bottom halves crack. It's the magnifiers, people. Why, why, why do my interpreters go through so many magnifiers?

We've gone through stand-up magnifiers (kind of like low-powered dissection scopes, for those of my two fans who've had the pleasure). We've gone through three-lens hand magnifiers, and then the individual lens when I broke apart the few remaining three-lens mounts to make sure the kids at least had single lenses to use. And now?

Well. this time around I've ordered cheaper (read: plastic crap) hand lenses so that I could afford a class set again. They're cheap, they're plastic, they'll scratch...

And probably just to tick me off the staff won't lose a single one of them this year.

Gah.




Sorry, I always get a little bit on edge as we gear up to spring busy season. This probably isn't the last you'll hear about it.

But I hope at least that it'll be the last plastic crap order I have to make for a while.

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All right, now here's the update part. It's my hole-y shoulder, which I haven't been talking about because I know that no one really wants to hear the gory details. Today, here at work, I took the bandage off of my shoulder because I was itchy.

I was itchy, and I figured I may as well take off the bandage anyway because IT'S FINALLY SEALED UP. Yes, I no longer have a gaping hole in my shoulder, boys and girls. It took its own blessed time to get to this point, but I think that finally -- finally -- I'll be able to go on with my life without worrying what simple things like showering are going to do to increase my chances of reinfection.

Yay.

It's no fun having a hole in your shoulder, you know.

Oh, and to anyone wondering why my hole-less shoulder even had a bandage on it, well... I was just worried about my clothes rubbing on it.

I guess we'll find out tonight whether I need to go back to the bandages.

I really hope I don't.

I'm not terribly fond of them, after all of this.




Um, yeah. You needed to know that. Back to work for me, now. I need to unwrap all of the plastic crap.